r/PokemonInvestor

The voices are getting louder

I want to pick this card up to hold for a few years do you guys think this card is undervalued and worth more in a 10? It’s a pop 1000

I built a model that prices PSA 10 slabs off fundamentals like population, gem rate, pull rate, character, age and print run. It spits out what a slab should be worth, then flags it as underpriced, overpriced, or fairly valued.

I wanted to build something that could help me decide when it was a good time to purchase a card or find cards that were undervalued before they jumped up in price.

I've been logging every call daily for a bit over two months now, 1,723 slabs.

The first chart, green is everything it called underpriced and red is everything it called overpriced. Grey is the slabs it deemed fairly priced.

Underpriced ended at +11.3%, overpriced at −7.7%. That's the average price move since the day each call was made.

The grey line is the one I'd actually look at first. Those are the slabs the model had no opinion on and they finished flat at −0.5%. If those had run too it would just mean the whole market moved and my calls didn't mean anything.

The second chart splits it by how sure the model was on each call. Every call gets a conviction label of strong, watch, or lean. Strong means the gap cleared my threshold outright, watch and lean are progressively smaller gaps.

Strong underpriced calls are at +17.6% and strong overpriced at −14.8%, so 32 percentage points between the two ends.

Every card's individual call is free to look at on hyperpotion.io if you want to pick holes in it.

What surprised me is the conviction tiers lined up in order both ways. Strong beat watch beat lean going up, and the same going down. I wasn't expecting the confidence labels to hold up that cleanly.

Two months isn't a super long track record, but it is the first read I've got, and I'll keep posting it as more accumulates whether it holds up or not.

Hi i’m here in Japan visiting and I’m just starting to get into Pokémon cards and just wanted to ask if I overpaid for this starter kit. I paid 26000 yen/162 usd.

As the title says, I’m wondering if you all would consider this dark Charizard as heavily played or damaged? It kinda looks like a kid bit it at some point! Could you use it in official play? Do you think it would get a PSA 1? That could increase the value of the card by around $120.

It took Pokemon 25 years to print its first 34 billion cards. The last five years added 51 billion. Sixty percent of every card that exists was made since 2021, and the fear is obvious: print that much and prices should collapse.

Baseball cards did exactly that in the late 80s and early 90s, when companies printed cards by the billion, demand disappeared, and most of it is worthless 35 years later. Collectors call that the junk wax era, and a lot of people expect Pokemon to be the sequel.

So I checked the prices. Every booster box and ETB in my database with two plus years of history, 154 products, monthly TCGplayer medians from 2021 to June 2026, sorted by the era the boxes were made in. Chart attached. The eras printed during the boom are at the top, the low-print eras from the 2000s are at the bottom.

The strict version, same months for every box (June 2022 to June 2026): Sword & Shield era boxes returned a median 6.02x. Base through EX era, printed when the lifetime total was still around 14 billion cards, returned 2.36x. Reran it from Jan 2023 and June 2023, the gap holds every time.

Where the losses actually are: four boxes out of 154 are below entry, and all four are five figure vintage boxes (Emerald, Majestic Dawn, Crystal Guardians, Holon Phantoms). Zero modern boxes. The modern losses people expect live in one place only, the pre-release window. Thirteen products entered at hype prices and were 40 to 90 percent cheaper at retail a month later. Twilight Masquerade PC ETB: $556 pre-order, $58 on shelves, $186 today.

My read: last year's 10 billion cards are supply for sets in print now. They don't add a single box to the pool of retired sealed sets, which is where all of that growth sits. I can't separate "printing doesn't hurt" from "demand outran everything", and I don't need to. The claim was that print volume predicts price damage. Five years of prices say no.

Limits: this is through June 2026, the new 1.27M sq ft plant goes full scale in 2028, and per-set print runs aren't published, so "era" means when a box was made, not a counted run. Method and losers table in the link.

Is this card going to $1? 🤣

Can anyone give me an idea on what these two cards value of these two cards are? I have looked in two apps and can’t find them. TIA

Which card would you want.

I've been building BinderTrax, a trading card app that combines everything collectors and card dealers usually juggle across separate apps and spreadsheets into one place. Looking for a handful of testers on Android before a wider release.

I'm a developer by trade, and I've been using Card Dealer Pro and Collx for a few years. A few months ago I finally got frustrated enough to build my own app and put it out there with the million+ other apps. I was tired of CDP not making an effort to match TCG cards, making a weak attempt at sports cards, and having a 9% accuracy success rate. I tried making suggestions to their leadership, tried to explain how collectors and resellers actually do things, and they brushed me off, not to mention the constant errors you experience on both platforms.

What it does:

Scan cards instantly with your camera — identifies the card, pulls live market pricing, and adds it to your collection in seconds. Supports Pokémon, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, One Piece, sports cards, Funko, and a dozen+ other TCGs. Batch-scan a whole stack at once, or fly through cards one after another with the live scanner. The only thing we don't currently support is graded card lookups, but that's, hopefully, coming soon.

A real digital Binder for your collection, with live market value tracked automatically as prices move. For TCG, we have a ghost binder when viewing by set so you can see what you have and what you need.

Plus, my favorite, the PokeTrax (Pokedex) is where your cards build your Pokedex. Scanning a higher rarity will replace a lower rarity in PokeTrax.

Duplicate copies of the same card are grouped together in the Binder instead of cluttering your view, but each physical copy still tracks its own storage location independently — so you can have five copies of one card split across different boxes/binders and the app keeps that straight.

Full inventory management built in, not just a collection tracker — locations, stock levels, receiving, for anyone running this as a side hustle or business.

Barcode scanning for fast lookups, plus the ability to generate and print real barcode and QR inventory labels — no separate labeling software needed. Plus, you can scan your own QR or barcode when selling at shows to remove the card from your eBay inventory so you don't have to remember to do it after you get home.

Sell straight to eBay, including eBay variation listings (one listing, multiple card options a buyer picks from) that keep each copy's storage location attached, so when a variation sells, the app tells you exactly which physical copy to pull and where it is.

A point-of-sale checkout for in-person sales, with barcode scanning and QR "scan to pay."

Market trend tracking and a Dealer Hub showing what's moving, what's hot, and your own collection's value over time.

A condition "Appraiser" tool — photograph a card's front and back for an advisory centering/condition read before deciding whether to grade it.

A deck builder, wish list/buy list, and eBay price comps lookups.

What testing involves: install the app, use it for real over the next couple weeks (scan some cards, browse the Binder, try an eBay listing if you have an account, print a label if you have a printer handy), and tell me what breaks or feels confusing. This is Google Play closed testing, so it's low-commitment.

Yes, this app will eventually be paywalled because infrastructure and data API's aren't free, but I feel like the price per tier is competitive with other offerings because you get more with BinderTrax.

Opt in here for Android: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.bindertrax.app

Android users also must join Google Group: https://groups.google.com/g/bindertrax

Opt in here for iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/UbkkZ6V5

Website: https://bindertrax.com

Happy to answer questions in the comments.

Full disclosure: I built CollectAIO.

I wanted a faster way to identify and price Pokémon products I come across at card shops or shows, especially Japanese sealed items when I don’t know the exact English set name.

This is a real scan of a Ruler of the Black Flame booster box. The app matched the exact product and pulled up its current market value. From there, I can check the price history and sold listings behind the number.

Would you use this while shopping? What would you want to see before trusting the price?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/collectaio-price-guide/id6775346959

It’s the 2000 Japanese CD promo in a psa 10. And I bought it a while back and I’m think of selling some of my collection including this card. Do you guys think 3000$ is a fair price for this card. I need to fix my car and I’m short on cash so just trying to see what a fair price for an older card like this would be. Thanks for all the help guys!!!! 😊🙏

Thinking of making a $500 offer on this shining Celebi holo. It looks to be in great condition and others are going up to $700 that look like this. Do you think this is a good investment??

Had this debate with a buddy the other day: if you added up the value of every card of a given Pokémon, which one comes out on top? I said Charizard. He said Sylveon, turns out we were wrong lol

So we actually checked (We've built a leaderboard that ranks Pokémon by the combined value of all their cards). Charizard is 5th.

Here's the current top 10:

1. Mewtwo
2. Rayquaza
3. Gyarados
4. Ho-oh
5. Charizard
6. Gengar
7. Pikachu
8. Mudkip
9. Umbreon
10. Tyranitar

What got us: Gyarados over Charizard? Mudkip in the top 10 at all?? Turns out a Pokémon with a ton of desirable cards across many sets can out-total one with a single famous chase card, the "add it all up" view looks nothing like the single-card rankings in our heads.

Worth being upfront: this is English-market cards only, so Japanese-exclusive stuff (Mew has some wild JP promos, for instance) isn't counted, which would definitely shuffle things. Fair limitation, not pretending otherwise.

Anyway, who did you assume would be #1? And does Charizard being 5th surprise you as much as it did us?

If you want to see the rest of the leaderboard, it's at tcgforecast.app/leaderboard